1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of information handling system management, and more particularly to a system and method for generation of an information handling system MOF file.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems have tremendous flexibility in part due to the wide variety of components available for building systems to achieve desired processing goals. However, the corollary to such flexibility is that information handling system manufacturers often struggle to integrate components and systems with each other. In response, industry has formed a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) System Management Work Group (SMWG) that seeks to standardize system management software, such as by encouraging compliance with the Common Information Model (CIM) standards. CIM exchanges management information in a platform-independent and technology-neutral manner to standardize integration and reduce costs by enabling end-to-end multi-vendor interoperability of management systems. CIM applies an object oriented model to describe an organization's processing and networking environments, such as available hardware software and services. However, the CIM schema has grown complicated with thousands of classes defined in hundreds of Managed Object Format (MOF) files. MOF files are text documents that contain definitions of object-oriented classes and instances. The interdependent relationships among the classes defined in the standard MOF files have grown increasingly complex as the CIM standard has evolved through successive versions.
One difficulty with the complexity of the CIM schema is that manual entries for generating a MOF file or set of MOF files are often complex, requiring an in-depth understanding of the class definitions in the MOF schema to build relationships based on the schema. Since there are significant differences between versions of the MOF schema, updating to a new schema typically requires a reworking of the manually generated MOF files. Due to significant differences between CIM Object Managers (CIMOM), manual steps are typically required to create a Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) compliant MOF file and an Open Web-Based Enterprise Management (Open WBEM) compliant MOF file. Such manual steps are time consuming and susceptible to mistakes and MOF files generated by different vendors are likely to be inconsistent. Generally, MOF files are compiled in a certain order, such as; by compiling MOF files with classes in the derivation tree parents first order, or by inserting “#include” to interrelate MOF files, or by creating a large MOF file with every class defined in the right order. However, these techniques tend to introduce inconsistencies and tend to require rewriting when new CIM schema versions are introduced. Inaccuracies effect system operations since MOF files are the way that a provider programmer and client application programmer communicate and working independently is difficult, usually resulting in the same developer writing both provider and client applications.